The Institute for Language & Communication of the University of Louvain (Louvain- la-Neuve, Belgium) offers a PhD position on the topic: Emerging discourse markers in the right periphery. The successful candidate will be hosted by the Research Center Valibel- Discours & Variation (www.uclouvain.be/valibel) and work in close collaboration with researchers involved in projects on the grammaticalization of discourse markers.

The aim of the PhD-project is to investigate to what extent the right periphery of the utterance favours the emergence of new discourse meanings, especially in the area of discourse markers. The right periphery represents the end of a message at a moment in time where the message itself exists and is manifest to both speaker and hearer. Therefore the right periphery is the natural place to comment on a message or to express expectations pertaining to it towards the hearer. Recent work (e.g. Degand & Fagard in press) has shown that the occurrence of discourse markers in the right periphery is a fairly recent phenomenon and that the migration of discourse markers from initial and medial position goes hand in hand with semantic change. From a synchronic point of view, markers appearing at the right of their host unit of discourse are exceptional (cf. Fraser 1999); however if they do appear in this position, they tend to have an interpersonal function (cf. Brinton 1996), rather than an information-structuring one. They serve to confirm shared assumptions, check or express understanding, request confirmation, express deference or are used for face-saving (cf. Brinton 1996: 37). Right- peripheral constructions reflect or invite attitudes towards the message or the situation rather than contributing to the message itself. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by certain patterns of language change, since the right periphery seems to be involved in the rise of modal constructions such as modal particles. The first aim of the PhD-project is thus to discover whether one can establish a "discourse marker paradigm" on the right periphery in speech and/or writing in synchrony.

The second aim of the project is to discover whether such a potential discourse marker paradigm can be explained in diachronic terms. Following Traugott (1982: 256) we will assume that "[i]f there occurs a meaning-shift which, in the process of grammaticalization, entails shifts from one functional-semantic component to another, then such a shift is more likely to be from propositional through textual to expressive than in reverse direction.". Language of investigation will be French, preferably in contrast to one or more other languages.

Profile: MA in Linguistics, (near) native command of French, very good knowledge of English, acquaintance with grammaticalization theory, acquaintance with corpus analyses, knowledge of French in diachrony